Docker is in volume in use, but there aren't any Docker containers

Question

Perhaps the volume was created via docker-compose? If so, it should get removed by:

docker-compose down --volumes

---

Credit to Niels Bech Nielsen!

You can use these functions to brutally remove everything Docker related:

removecontainers() {
    docker stop $(docker ps -aq)
    docker rm $(docker ps -aq)
}

armageddon() {
    removecontainers
    docker network prune -f
    docker rmi -f $(docker images --filter dangling=true -qa)
    docker volume rm $(docker volume ls --filter dangling=true -q)
    docker rmi -f $(docker images -qa)
}

You can add those to your ~/Xrc file, where X is your shell interpreter (~/.bashrc if you're using bash) file and reload them via executing source ~/Xrc. Also, you can just copy paste them to the console and afterwards (regardless the option you took before to get the functions ready) just run:

armageddon

It's also useful for just general Docker clean up. Have in mind that this will also remove your images, not only your containers (either running or not) and your volumes of any kind.

Volume can be in use by one of stopped containers. You can remove such containers by command:

docker container prune

then you can remove not used volumes

docker volume prune

I am fairly new to Docker. I was cleaning up some initial testing mess and was not able to remove a volume either. I had stopped all the running instances, performed a docker rmi -f $(docker image ls -q), but still received the Error response from daemon: unable to remove volume: remove uuid: volume is in use.

I did a docker system prune and it cleaned up what was needed to remove the last volume:

[0]$ docker system prune
WARNING! This will remove:
- all stopped containers
- all networks not used by at least one container
- all dangling images
- all build cache
Are you sure you want to continue? [y/N] y
Deleted Containers:
... about 15 containers UUID's truncated

Total reclaimed space: 2.273MB
[0]$ docker volume ls
DRIVER              VOLUME NAME
local              uuid
[0]$ docker volume rm uuid
uuid
[0]$

docker system prune

The client and daemon API must both be at least 1.25 to use this command. Use the docker version command on the client to check your client and daemon API versions.

As long as volumes are associated with a container(either running or not), they cannot be removed.

You have to run

docker inspect <container-id>/<container-name>

on each of the running/non-running containers where this volume might have been mounted onto.

If the volume is mounted onto any one of the containers, you should see it in the Mounts section of the inspect command output. Something like this :-

"Mounts": [
            {
                "Type": "volume",
                "Name": "user1",
                "Source": "/var/lib/docker/volumes/user1/_data",
                "Destination": "/opt",
                "Driver": "local",
                "Mode": "",
                "RW": true,
                "Propagation": ""
            }
        ],

After figuring out the responsible container(s), use :-

docker rm -f container-1 container-2 ...container-n in case of running containers

docker rm container-1 container-2 ...container-n in case of non-running containers

to completely remove the containers from the host machine.

Then try removing the volume using the command :-

docker volume remove <volume-name/volume-id>